George Devine - The Royal Court Theatre

The Royal Court Theatre

In 1952 the young director Tony Richardson cast Devine in a television adaptation of "Curtain Down", a short story by Anton Chekhov. There soon developed what Devine came to call their “great friendship”. Not long afterwards, together with Richardson's friend and partner the American sociologist George Goetschius, they formed a plan for a radical new theatre company, the objective of which, as Devine wrote later, “was to get writers, writers of serious pretensions, back into the theatre”, and thus to make the theatre “part of the intellectual life of the country”. The fulfilment of these goals led to the formation, in 1955, of what was called the English Stage Company. They acquired the rental of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London, and Devine placed an advertisement in The Stage asking for new plays. The Royal Court opened in April 1956 with a production of Angus Wilson’s play The Mulberry Bush, followed by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, in which Devine played Governor Danforth as well as directing. It was not until the fourth production, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, that the theatre really attracted public attention. Although the play was badly reviewed by traditional theatre critics such as Harold Hobson, a glowing review from the critic Kenneth Tynan ensured that the play eventually became a hit after a slow first few months.

Under Devine's direction the English Stage Company remained primarily a writer's theatre, nurturing new talents such as Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, Edward Bond, Donald Howarth, Keith Johnstone and many others. Devine’s policy of taking on young directors as assistants produced some notable talents including William Gaskill, John Dexter, Lindsay Anderson, Anthony Page and Peter Gill. Devine was also interested in continental drama. He staged several plays by Eugene Ionesco, including a celebrated production of The Chairs, in which he appeared with Joan Plowright. He also greatly admired Samuel Beckett, several of whose plays were produced at the Royal Court, including Endgame, in which Devine played Hamm.

Several more of John Osborne's plays were staged at the Royal Court and George Devine was appearing in one, the transvestite drama A Patriot for Me, when he suffered a second heart attack, followed soon afterwards by a stroke that eventually led to his death at the age of 55. He had begun to draft an autobiography, which included these words:

I was not strictly after a popular theatre a la Joan Littlewood-Roger Planchon, but a theatre that would be part of the intellectual life of the country. In this respect I consider I utterly failed. I feel I have the right to talk in this proprietary way about The English Stage Company to which I gave nine years of my life and nearly died in the tenth. I was convinced the way to achieve my objective was to get writers, writers of serious pretensions, back into the theatre. This I set out to do. I wanted to change the attitude of the public towards the theatre. All I did was to change the attitude of the theatre towards the public.